In February 1992, the Princess of Wales travelled through India on a royal tour that produced hundreds of photographs: wreaths, receptions, ribbon-cuttings. One image from a small school in Hyderabad outlasted nearly all of them. It shows Diana on a stage with a little girl in a dance costume, face painted, feet bare, perched on her knee.
The girl was four-year-old Avanti Reddy. More than three decades later, the story of what happened in those few minutes is still told with a tenderness that has little to do with protocol.
The dance
Diana was visiting Lalapet Government High School when Avanti performed a traditional Lambadi folk dance, the kind of tribal dance associated with communities across the Deccan. Dance ran in the family: Avanti's mother, Japamala Rani, was a dance teacher who had choreographed the performance for the royal visit.
After the dance, Avanti recalls, she was sitting on the ground when Diana noticed her, picked her up, carried her back to the stage and sat her on her knee.
The handkerchief
The details Avanti remembers are small and domestic. Diana asked her name, her school and her class. Avanti had a cold, and Diana, seeing it, wiped the child's nose with her own handkerchief. She kept the girl beside her for the rest of the visit, and as the time came to leave, she said she did not want to go.
Then came the line that has followed the photograph ever since. Diana reportedly told her: “I don't have a daughter, so today you are my daughter.”
What came after
According to the account, the two stayed in touch by letter, and Diana sent Avanti a signed photograph, which she still keeps framed. The connection was meant to go further: Avanti's uncle made plans for her to visit Diana, but those plans ended with Diana's death in the Paris crash in 1997.
Avanti was too young in 1992 to understand who had lifted her onto her knee. She has said she only came to grasp it as she grew older, reading Diana's biography and, like many girls of her generation, wanting hair cut in the same soft layers. By the time she spoke to the Daily Mail in 2018, she was 28 and working as a qualified dance and primary school teacher.
A moment, not a claim
It is worth being plain about what this story is. Nobody is suggesting a legal, adoptive or biological bond. Diana, who had two sons, was reaching for words in the middle of an emotional encounter with a child, and “daughter” was the word she chose. That is the whole of it, and it is enough to explain why the photograph resonates: it caught a woman known for her ease with children at one of her warmest.
A different story: Diana's real Indian roots
The title of this piece invites a confusion that should be cleared up. The Avanti Reddy story has no connection to a separate and much later discovery about Diana's family tree.
In 2013, geneticists at Britain's DNA, led by Dr Jim Wilson of the University of Edinburgh, announced that Diana did indeed have Indian ancestry. It came through her direct maternal line, to Eliza Kewark, a woman who lived in the Surat area of western India, near Bombay, in the early 1800s. She was Prince William's great-great-great-great-great-grandmother and the housekeeper and partner of a Scottish East India Company merchant, Theodore Forbes.
Eliza had long been described as Armenian, as her father was. But the mitochondrial DNA passed from mother to child through her daughters and granddaughters to Diana, and from Diana to William and Harry, turned out to be a rare type found almost exclusively among people from India. The conclusion was that Eliza's mother was Indian, making Eliza at least half-Indian. Researchers said the discovery meant William carries a trace of Indian ancestry, and Diana's aunt, Mary Roach, said she was delighted by the news.
So there are two Indian threads in Diana's story: a four-year-old girl she briefly called her daughter in Hyderabad in 1992, and a great-great-great-great-great-grandmother whose origins DNA testing revealed twenty-one years later. One is a memory, the other is a fact of heredity, and they should not be confused with each other.
References:
- The Indian girl who Diana called 'my daughter'. The Daily Star (Bangladesh), citing Mail Online. https://www.thedailystar.net
- La 'hija' hindú de la princesa Diana reapareció a sus 28 años. Metro (Puerto Rico), 19 July 2018, citing a Daily Mail interview. https://www.metro.pr
- Princess Diana in India: A Look Back (photo gallery, Jayne Fincher/Getty Images). ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com
- Prince William inherited Indian DNA from Princess Diana. ITV News, 14 June 2013. https://www.itv.com
- DNA link to Prince William's Indian ancestry. Channel 4 News, 14 June 2013. https://www.channel4.com
- DNA proves heir to British throne has Indian blood. Bangkok Post. https://www.bangkokpost.com
- Prince William has Indian ancestry: study. Gulf Times. https://www.gulf-times.com
- Princess Diana's Hidden Ancestral Secret Revealed. ABC News Radio (2013), via East Idaho News. https://www.eastidahonews.com/?p=70109
- DNA analysis shows Eliza Kewark was half-Indian. Armenpress. https://armenpress.am/en/article/722659
- Further ancestors of the Princess of Wales. Vita Brevis, American Ancestors, 2018. https://vitabrevis.americanancestors.org
The Avanti Reddy account (references 1–3) is drawn from her own recollections as reported by the Daily Mail in 2018 and republished by the outlets below. The ancestry findings (references 4–10) are drawn from the 2013 BritainsDNA / University of Edinburgh announcement and subsequent coverage.